Coming up with better ways to get where we need to go and power the lives we live requires development of new technologies, along with research to help us minimize the impact of these technologies on our environment. The overall goal of this series is to encourage people to ask questions and look beyond fossil fuels for innovative solutions to our ever-growing energy needs. Interest in science and technology provides the necessary foundation for our future in a world powered by clean energy.

The series also provides insight into what careers in science, engineering and other topics related to clean energy technologies are really like.

Coming up with better ways to get where we need to go and power the lives we live requires creativity, ingenuity and hard work. Host Lisa Van Pay visits the scientists and engineers working to make the electric car of the future a reality today.

A green roof can certainly make a building look nicer, but can it measurably lower energy requirements and improve water management? Researchers hope that architects will someday use their model to make building designs even greener.

A trip to Snowy River, a bright white crystalline formation found deep within Fort Stanton Cave in New Mexico, reveals a lot about life and energy in unexpected places. Host Lisa Van Pay meets Diana Northup and Monica Moya, researchers who study life in caves.

Lisa Van Pay of the National Science Foundation meets with Will Lark, an MIT graduate student working on the CityCar project. The two discuss the technologies that make this vehicle unique and explore the relationship between art, science, and design.

Host Lisa Van Pay meets with NSF-funded scientists Yang-Shao Horn and Yogi Surendranath at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as they take on the hydrogen energy challenge. From the importance of developing an effective catalyst to speed up electrolysis, to the construction and operation of the fuel cell, this episode demonstrates that sometimes it only takes a little to do a lot.

Explore how a smart grid will connect renewable energy resources to our existing power grid and help us share that power more efficiently. By developing control systems that regulate electricity flow, a research group is making our power grid smarter.

Lisa Van Pay of the National Science Foundation (NSF) talks to Bruce Logan, an environmental engineer at Penn State University who studies bioenergy technologies related to water treatment. Virtually any biodegradable material can be used to produce power.

Explore how different types of biomass can be used to produce fuel, from growing algae used to create biofuel, to conversion of cellulose in plants to a fermentable sugar used to make ethanol and using chemistry and heat to turn sawmill waste into bio-oil and gasoline.

Arizona gets plenty of sunlight, and researchers there are working hard to turn that energy into electricity we can use, testing new materials that will allow us to build smaller, cheaper, flexible photovoltaic solar cells that can go almost anywhere.

We visit Colorado, a leader in wind energy technologies, to learn more about one of the fastest growing sources of renewable energy in the U.S. We visit NSF's National Center for Atmospheric Research, where scientists are working with local utility companies to create an advanced wind energy prediction system.